Aqueous floor polishes typified by aqueous polymer-containing floor polishes are applied to floors typically of department stores, mass retailers, supermarkets, and office buildings. Coating layers formed from these aqueous floor polishes serve to retain beautiful appearances and cleanliness of the floors and to prevent soiling and abrasion of flooring materials.
The coating layers after forming become soiled due typically to traffic and become scuffed due typically to sand and dust, and such soil and scuffs accumulate day by day. It has therefore been periodically carried out to clean the floors with cleaning agents for removing the soil from their surface layers, and to coat them with a new layer of a floor polish to thereby retain the floor surfaces clean. When it is difficult to maintain a floor surface clean due typically to significant soil and/or deep scuffing of the coating layer, the floor is cleaned using a polisher with a stripping agent to strip off the entire coating layer (hereinafter this operation is also referred to as “cleaning-by-stripping”), and a new layer of a floor polish is applied to the floor to refresh a coating layer.
This cleaning-by-stripping operation requires much efforts and time. The operation also has a problem in safety, because the floor surface after the application of a stripping agent is very slippery to cause failing accidents. Furthermore, the striping agent adversely affects the working environment and causes deterioration of construction materials. This is because the striping agent mainly contains an alkali, such as an amine, ammonia, or sodium hydroxide, and an organic solvent, such as an alcohol solvent or a glycol solvent. The alkali is used for cleaving crosslinking bonds in a resin coating constituting the coating layer, and the organic solvent is used for swelling the resin coating. Waste liquids wasted after cleaning-by-striping of such floor polishes are significant from the viewpoint of protecting the environment.
To solve these problems, there have been recently investigated aqueous floor polish compositions whose coating layers (overcoat layers) covering floors are strippable by hand (hereinafter also referred to as “strippable aqueous floor polish composition(s)”).
Patent Document 1 discloses an example of the strippable aqueous floor polish compositions.
In floor coating materials, there has been known a strippable floor coating material which uses a latex as a release coating (undercoat layer) and an epoxy resin as a durable coating (overcoat layer), in which the release coating and the durable coating are peelable as a unit (Patent Document 2).    Patent Document 1: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2004-231823    Patent Document 2: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. H11-199802